A shot of rum stirred with a dose of death

Feb 03, 2019 Features / Columnists, Murder and Mystery

“The higher the dose, the better,’’ James told the hired killer.
“My targets are so easy. They sleep in the street, right on the pavement…”
By Michael Jordan

In June 1999, Hardeo Sewnanan was drinking in a Chinese restaurant in Berbice with a friend when he suddenly collapsed. He was taken to a hospital where he died shortly after.
There appeared to be nothing strange about this death. If one wanted to put it decently, one would merely say that Sewnanan was a hard-drinking man. But the real truth was that Sewnanan was a straight-out alcoholic, and the initial verdict was that he had died from an overdose of liquor.
But the pathologist who performed the autopsy found something disturbing.
Examining Sewnanan’s stomach, he came to the conclusion that the alcoholic had been poisoned. His drink had apparently been laced with ammonia.
The man with whom Sewnanan had taken his last drink was the victim’s uncle, 53-year-old Ronald Mallay, a postal employee.
But for some reason, foul play was not suspected. Perhaps the local police believed that the down-and-out victim had taken his own life.
And most certainly the ‘suicide’ appeared to have nothing to do with the death of Alfred Gobin. Two years earlier, Gobin was shot dead in his Berbice home, apparently the victim of bandits. He was the father of Ronald Mallay’s girlfriend.
And it seemed as if misfortune was following persons who were close to Mr. Mallay. On July 28, 1993, Mallay’s brother-in-law, 43-year-old Vernon ‘Dilly’ Peters was walking to work near the Woodside Houses in New York when a group of men accosted him, while demanding his wallet and jewellery. One of the robbers then shot him in the head.
Like many Guyanese, Ronald Mallay eventually migrated to the United States of America, along with a close friend and fellow Guyanese, insurance agent Richard James. The men took up residence in the Queens, New York area with its high population of West Indians.
James was also one of MetLife insurance company’s most successful agents, while also hosting a cable television show featuring Guyanese music and dance. But, like his friend Ronald Mallay, death seemed to always follow those who were close to Richard James.
In 1998, 42-year-old Basdeo Somaipersaud, an alcoholic and Guyanese by birth, was found dead on a park bench in New York City. The first assumption was that Somaipersaud had cracked his head while under the influence. But then the autopsy revealed that the man had died from intoxication from alcohol and chlorpormazine, a sedative sometimes used to treat schizophrenia. A pathologist also observed that there were small punctures on the victim’s torso.
Investigators suspected that someone injected Somaipersaud with lethal doses of the sedative while he was in a defenceless, drunken stupor, and then tried to cash in on the man’s life insurance policy.
The person who had taken out an insurance policy on the unemployed man was none other than insurance agent Richard James.
And James’ employers, MetLife, were also becoming suspicious of him. They discovered that 21 death claims had been filed from policies written by James within a few years.
The rate of deaths was approximately 318 percent higher than expected, and a large number of his clients had died violently or under unusual circumstances. They discovered that $300,000 was collected from the death of Mallay’s nephew in Guyana, where he was killed with alcohol and ammonia. That policy had been written up by Mallay.
In the case of Somaipersaud, the alcoholic who had died on a park bench, MetLife paid out US$84,000 in proceeds. MetLife suspected that most of the money was secretly funneled back to James, who had also prepared that policy.
And Mallay had also prepared a MetLife policy for his brother-in-law, Vernon Peters, who was gunned down on his way to work.
In July 2000, MetLife fired James and notified the authorities, who put him under surveillance.
In 2002, investigators caught James on audiotape trying to pay an informant US$25,000 to kill another victim with a mix of alcohol and drugs to collect insurance, court papers said.
“The higher the dose, the better,’’ he allegedly told the informant. “My targets are so easy. They sleep in the street, right on the pavement.”
Before the plot could be carried out, agents arrested James trying to flee to Guyana with a large amount of cash.
Another informant also told investigators that in 1998, he turned down US$5,000 from Mallay to kill a “drunk’’ who hung out at Smokey Oval Park in the US.
The investigators believed that James wrote out the false policies for the murder-for-profit scheme, which mainly targeted down-and-out alcoholics. They believed that his friend, Robert Mallay, carried out some of the killings.
In May 2007, the two men were tied in connection with the four murders, although investigators suspected that they had murdered several others in a multimillion-dollar scheme.
The men’s attorneys attempted to prove that Sewnanan and Somaipersaud had died from natural causes, brought on by alcoholism. In the case of Sewnanan, who had collapsed and died in Guyana, the defence suggested that only the most ‘rudimentary’ and ‘primitive’ medical examinations had been conducted in Guyana. However, the Guyanese pathologist who had conducted the autopsy testified that the man had indeed been poisoned.
Eventually, in July 2007, James and Mallay were found guilty of murder conspiracy and other charges by a federal jury in Brooklyn. The gruesome insurance murder scheme that was hatched in Guyana and the US was over.

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